The University of Vermont's College of Medicine has recently
established a model curriculum centered around genetics,
epidemiology, and ethics. It thus seems fitting that the first
comprehensive historical study of any state's eugenics activities
also focuses on Vermont. Biologist and historian Nancy L. Gallagher
has written a first-rate scientific biography of University of
Vermont zoologist Henry F. Perkins's eleven-year coordination of
the Eugenics Survey of Vermont.

Perkins, a descendant of a Burlington, Vermont, academic family
of Christian Darwinists, returned to his alma mater, the University
of Vermont, in 1902 after completing his doctoral studies on the
reproductive adaptation of jellyfish under the supervision of Johns
Hopkins embryologist William Keith Brookes. Like many biologists in
this era, Perkins eventually became embroiled in studies that
influenced the reproduction of another animal—humans. Prompted by
his students' interests in the work of the Eugenics Record Office,
he secured his university's support in 1925 to devote considerable
time toward a project "merging eugenics with progressive social
reform in Vermont" (p. 41). Imbued with a heroic vision that
Vermont "arose from a struggle for its integrity as an independent
republic and its continual production of men and women of tough
moral fiber, intelligence, and leadership, who played key roles in
every major event in American history, from the War of Independence
to the abolition of slavery and the settlement of the American
frontier" (p. 43), Perkins developed guidelines for eugenic reform
that would replenish Vermont's high-caliber reproductive stock.

To achieve his vision, Perkins appealed to Vermont's Children's
Aid Society, an organization devoted to preserving "wholesome
family groups" (p. 59). In order to create a "Eugenic Vermont," he
planned to "turn the social records of families registered [in the
Children's Aid Society]. . . into pedigrees of degeneracy that
would help support a campaign for legalized sterilization" (p. 71).
He also hoped to document that French Canadian immigrants were
chiefly responsible for his state's "subnormalcy" (p. 95).

Five annual reports of Vermont's Eugenics Survey appeared
between 1927 and 1931. Beginning in the third report (1929),
Perkins reframed the survey as the Committee on the Human Factor,
part of his state's newly organized Commission on Country Life, and
he downplayed his earlier negative eugenic tactics. Such actions,
as Gallagher clearly articulates, reflected a concurrent trend
across the United States to promote positive eugenics through
Fitter Family contests. Perkins's eugenic efforts reached their
pinnacle in 1931 with both the publication of his positive eugenics
treatise, Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, and the
state's adoption of a sterilization law for its social
"incompetents" (p. 123).

Gallagher has skillfully placed Perkins within both Vermont
history and the eugenics movement, two contexts in which he
flourished. She shows precisely the extent to which Perkins was
influenced by particular eugenic ideals. His course lectures and
textbooks are analyzed to illuminate how newly found genetic and
eugenic knowledge of the period was practically applied among the
U.S. human population. Elsewhere, Gallagher elaborates upon the
Eugenics Record Office's training of Harriet E. Abbott, Perkins's
first "social worker," showing how eugenic knowledge initially
became integrated into the series of profiles and pedigrees of
Vermont's "defective" families that Abbott created (p. 75). These
pedigrees, as Gallagher shows, were subsequently used by Perkins
and other eugenicists in engineering positive eugenic strategies to
improve Vermont's breeding stock. Gallagher's familiarity with both
science and history is clear as this work, unlike much eugenics
scholarship, deftly interweaves the intellectual (i.e., scientific)
backbone of eugenics into a broader social narrative.

The last of Gallagher's four chapters is devoted to "National
Recognition, Crisis, and Reform" from 1931 through Perkins's death
in 1956. This section is her best effort to contextualize Vermont's
eugenics activism with that in other states...

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